The One Best Thing College Students Can Do To Land A Job

We know the job market for college seniors is tough but a report released today paints the picture in stark colors. As of April 2014 only 16.6% of college seniors had gotten a single full-time job offer. That’s according to a survey of 9,000 students by InternMatch, a five-year-old San Francisco-based website that lists internships and entry-level jobs. (Some 65% of those polled said they had started looking for work in earnest by that date.)

But there is a sure-fire way that students can up their chances of finding work. Though the conclusion is self-serving for InternMatch, I think it’s a valid one: Nearly a quarter (24.9%) of seniors who had recently done a paid internship had landed full-time offers.

Another striking finding from the survey, which correlates with data I reported on two years ago: one third as many seniors who had done unpaid internships, or just 8.2%, had landed offers. That meager number would suggest that doing unpaid internships may not even be worthwhile. Unless you do multiple internships. The survey also shows that 24% of students who had done four or more internships, whether paid or unpaid, had found jobs. That compares with just 10.4% of seniors who had only done one internship. According to the survey, nearly 70% of seniors report completing at least one internship by graduation.

The survey has another number I find startling, given the lawsuits over unpaid internships and what I argued earlier this week is the law, that unpaid internships are illegal, at least in for-profit businesses. Less than half, just 48.3% of respondents, told InternMatch that they had worked in paying internships, while 6.5% got a stipend. That means a little less than half worked for free.

Given those numbers, I’m especially struck by this finding: Only 29.4% of respondents said they thought the plaintiffs in the unpaid internship suits were right to bring legal challenges. More than two thirds, 70.6%, said they believed that the interns should have simply quit if they were unhappy.

While consulting firms like Deloitte and
Ernst & Young, energy companies like ExxonMobil and big tech companies like Facebook,
Google and Amazon, all recognize that it makes business sense to compensate interns, many firms in the fashion, film and media business have gotten away with paying nothing, and that practice seems to be spreading, according to some reporting I did last week. I saw listings for unpaid internships at small investment banks, at a technology company, in healthcare companies like the
Mayo Clinic. My question: where is the incentive for these employers to pay interns, especially in this desperate job market, if courts don’t make the law clear?

Perhaps the most disturbing statistic from the survey, given the ongoing debate about gender pay equity: 60.6% of male students reported they had done paying internships while only 40.2% of female students had. InternMatch also asked men and women about the salaries they had tried to get. Men asked for $14 an hour while women settled for just $11.15. I had hoped this next generation of female grads would peg their worth at least as high as men. It’s time to lean in, women!

The survey is full of other data, including what student interns consider a fair wage ($12.45 an hour, which seems awfully low to me) and the preferred tools students use to find jobs (social media ranked No. 1). It also lists the businesses where students most want to do internships, starting with public relations/marketing/advertising (36.9%), tech companies (29.2%), government (28.8%), consulting (25.9%) and healthcare (18.6%). The least popular field: agriculture (3.5%). I would have thought that more students would want to work in financial services, but only 16.8% said that was their field of choice. I’m heartened by the public spirit impulse behind the 17.9% who named “community organizations.”

Finally I want to note a part of the survey that struck me. Though it says 48% of students used Google to find internship opportunities, just under 50% of students who landed internships got them through friends, while nearly 40% got them through a family connection and 21.6% through an alumni connection. In other words, many students find internships through people they know, as the saying goes. As I’ve advised many times, use a service like InternMatch or, my preference,
LinkedIn, and then try to find a personal connection to the job through friends, family, alumni and acquaintances, to make sure the job is still open and ideally, to get your connection to put in a word for you.

The survey underlines how paid internships will help you land a job. Let’s hope that more employers start paying.